The yellow book: an illustrated quarterly (11.1896)

The Elsingfords

By Robert Shews

I
It was a marriage of which everybody augured ill. When a
rumour of the engagement first obtained currency, every-
body scoffed. It was impossible. And even after it had received
official confirmation, people couldn’t shake off a sort of dazed
incredulity. It must be some mistake. That any one in his
senses should voluntarily espouse Hennie Bleck was a proposition
which the mind refused to grasp, like a contradiction in terms ;
and of Herbert Elsingford it had always been felt that he was
peculiarly in his senses. He gave you the impression of a man
who, fastidious in all things, would be overwhelmingly so in his
choice of a wife. He was an artist, and he was a man of the
world ; he had travelled, he had knocked about; he must have
had a varied experience of women, he must have had successes.
With that, and with his humour, his saving touch of cynicism,
one would have thought him the least likely of subjects for a
woman to make a fool of. One would have supposed that he
cultivated an unattainable feminine standard, that he would require
a combination of qualities such as never was on land or sea—the
qualities of a Grecian urn united to those of a rosebud. One
would